Carmen Reinhart

Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System, Harvard Kennedy School

Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress.

She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her papers have been published in leading scholarly journals. Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. Her best-selling book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff) entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press) documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterised financial history and has been translated to 13 languages.